All posts tagged burn

There are 4,500 soon-to-be-unemployed BlackBerry staffers who know better than anyone the pain the Canadian mobile maker is going through. For the approximately 7,000 who will still be working there, the big question is how much longer the company can sustain itself.

There are different ways to look at that question, but here’s one particularly urgent factor: How much cash does it have left to burn through before simply running out of money to pay the bills?

The answer is about 16 months worth, if the way it lost money in the last three months continues. When it reported results for the quarter ending on June 1, the company said it had $3.1 billion in cash and investments. By the end of August, according to the announcement today, that had been whittled down to $2.6 billion.

That implies the company is burning through half a billion dollars of cash every three months. If it keeps going at that pace, it has until sometime around November 2014 until the $2.6 billion it has left runs out completely.